Church of the Red Museum resumes service for Lost Weekend Records anniversary show

The first time Tom Butler was in a room with Church of the Red Museum, he was in the audience, recalling the sense of awe he felt in watching the band rip through a series of riveting, raw-nerve murder ballads during an early 2000s concert.

“And it was just already so wholly formed, like they had already built this full Church of the Red Museum world,” Butler said in early March. “They had the songs, the image, they all wore suits. And I wanted to be part of it.”

Butler would soon get his wish, with Red Museum singer and songwriter Brian Travis granting the guitarist’s pleas to join the fold – a desire further rooted in how the collective appeared to draw sonic inspiration from a number of artists Butler revered at the time, including Black Heart Procession, Pleasure Forever, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

For Travis, the band then existed as a means for him to exorcise the strains of daily existence, the frontman transforming his frustrations into songs that often played like violent cut scenes from Cormac McCarthy novels. “Every single song, barring one, is pulled directly from my life, even though I’ve never murdered anyone,” said Travis, who will join Church of the Red Museum when the band reunites for the first time in 16 years as part of the Lost Weekend Records 23rd Anniversary Show at Natalie’s Grandview on Saturday, March 7, joining a bill that includes Brian Damage, Salthorse, and Aaron Troyer’s Floating World, among others. “The songs gave me a way to work through those issues, and I grew from them. And I think I can look back on those situations a little more fondly now.”

At times, these issues were physical. The foreboding “A Flush Never Felt So Bad,” for one, centers a narrator who wakes up in a truck with no recollection of how they got there and stemmed from a series of concussions Travis suffered skateboarding, snowboarding, and in a car accident. Other times these issues were born of relationships, with “After All” surfacing in the wake of a romantic breakup and “Durham R.I.P.” written after Travis learned his estranged father had died years prior. “And then Brian took the process of trying to understand that and reconcile himself with that,” Butler said, “and made a great, dark, sad song out of it.”

The sense that something is being purged is heightened by Travis’ delivery, and there are points early on the band’s self-titled 2006 album when it sounds as though he’s being flayed alive. Told this, the singer responded with a “thank you” and a laugh, and then added that he was struck with strep throat while recording the songs, which “added to the roughness” of his performance.

Butler, meanwhile, described the frontman’s delivery as “the portrait of a man trying to get some of that out,” recalling how the band would push Travis to stretch his larynx to its absolute limits. “There was a point he could get to if he’d had just enough whiskey and had been yelling just long enough where it’d be this perfect rasp,” Butler said.

Basic tracks for the album were completed over three days, with auxiliary instruments such as violin, trumpets, marimba and xylophone added later, transforming the songs into ramshackle mini epics. “Before this, I was mainly doing shoegaze-based music, which had that whole wall-of-sound orchestration,” Travis said. “And I wanted to do that again, but with more folk instruments.”

While the characters in the band’s songs tend to meet swift, violent ends, Church of the Red Museum initially called it a day for far less dramatic reasons, the project dwindling out when multiple band members moved away from Ohio. Indeed, both Travis and Butler chalked up much of the group’s extended absence to this geographic distance, with members currently scattered between Columbus, Athens, and Kentucky. “It’s been a little bit of doing to make it happen,” Butler said. “But I’m excited to play those songs again.”

In the band’s first run, Butler said he viewed Church of the Red Museum’s music through a gnarlier lens, with time and experience having collided to shift his perspective. “I’m struck by how the songs used to feel aggressive to me, and now they feel melancholy,” said Butler, who attributed this evolution to having lived through a number of deaths in the last decade, including the passing of his mother and father, a cousin, and two roommates. “So before, the frame that I was looking at these songs through, I was like, yeah, these are kind of tough guy songs. And really, they’re not.”

More recently, the band’s music has even begun to take on a joyous feel for Butler, owing in part to the reality that nearly two decades after Church of the Red Museum’s formation, all of its members are still alive and kicking and able make noise with one another.

“The older we’ve gotten, and the fact that we’ve remained such tight friends, it makes you appreciate it all that much more,” said Butler, who will be joined onstage for the reunion show by Brian Travis (vocals/keys), Cassie Lewis (guitar), Ricky Thompson (synth/percussion), Robby Coleman (drums), Bil Jankowski (organ), Leslie Jankowski (trumpet/vocals), and Donnie Roberts (bass). “I appreciate the fact that I’m still here, and I can still play these songs with these people that I love so much. … I mean, these are dark songs, and they’re sad songs, but I think we play them with some degree of exuberance. There’s a real joy in how we’re playing now, where everybody is having fun and laughing and smiling. In fact, I even said something in practice where I was like, ‘Okay, everyone put your serious face on. We don’t want to look like we’re having too much fun up there.’”